The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

There is no one who has cooked but has discovered that each particular dish depends for its rightness upon some little point which he is never told. It is not only so of cooking: it is so of splicing a rope; of painting a surface of wood; of mixing mortar; of almost anything you like to name among the immemorial human arts.

We think in generalities, but we live in details.

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provokes it.